“You have no cause for self-accusation on that account, Mr. Farrar. You have set up a standard under which all men, whether wise or foolish, should not hesitate to gather. You cannot discriminate. To do so would be destructive to your cause.”
“In these distressing times I have even had doubts concerning the righteousness of my cause.”
She looked up at him in alarm. Had the fight been too strenuous for him, the strain too severe? Was he, after all, about to yield? to become just common clay? She, herself, had come to the rectory, despondent and despairing, to obtain new courage and strength from him. The burden of the suffering that she had witnessed during these last terrible weeks was crushing the leaven of optimism out of her heart. Were they both now to go weakly down together to defeat and disaster? A wave of stubborn aggressiveness swept into her soul. She would not permit it. She would not listen to so sinister a suggestion. She would rise in her own strength and save both him and herself.
“You have no right,” she declared, “to say that. Why do you harbor such a doubt?”
“Because it seems to me that if God were with me my church would not be falling into decay. Even the people in whose behalf we have fought are leaving us.”
“That is because, in these times, they are too ill-clothed, too hungry, too wretched to come to church. They do not realize that for these very reasons they stand in greater need of the consolation of religion.”
“True. But you can’t thrust religion down the throat of a man who is perishing from hunger. And the thought that distresses me is that I may have been in some way or to some extent responsible for all this suffering. If I had not preached to the laboring men, as I have, the gospel of discontent with things as they are, it may be that these dreadful days would not have come.”
He rose from his chair and began pacing up and down the room. She saw that he was in distress, and that if she would help him she must refute his argument.
“You have simply preached God’s truth to them,” she declared. “If they have profited by it to seek to better their condition, that fact redounds to your credit. It is those who oppress them who are responsible for this frightful situation; it is not you, nor your teachings, nor because the men have followed you.”
He was still walking rapidly up and down the room.